produced by Archives & Museum Informatics

site at http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/

The Future of Mobile Interpretation

Abstract

The last
several years have seen museums carefully moving away from outmoded audio
technology towards richer multimedia devices. However, while there have been a
handful of successful museum installations of multimedia guides, these devices still
have yet to take hold in museums in the same way that audio guides have. This may have less to do with the
technology itself, and more with the mindset that produces content for the
technology. This paper discusses
the means by which museums might break through these old ways of working and
begin producing truly next-generation mobile content.

Introduction

The last
several years have seen museums carefully moving away from outmoded audio
technology towards richer multimedia devices. However, while there have been a
handful of successful museum installations of multimedia guides, these devices still
have yet to take hold in museums in the same way that audio guides have. The
failure of the majority of handheld projects to date has been blamed on their
trying to do too much, using technology that is too complex, too expensive, or
"not ready for prime time." The resulting best practices, as
witnessed in the recent symposium on handheld devices at Tate Modern
(http://tatehandheldconference.pbwiki.com/), have emphasized simplifying
handheld applications and devices, in effect bringing them into line with
traditional audio tours but adding a few visuals. Although a few of these
devices may have individually failed as a result of poorly executed complexity,
simplification as a broad solution is not the answer. If anything, the failure
of these devices to find a voice in museums is because museums are, by and
large, not taking full advantage of the capabilities of this new generation of
multimedia devices.

Multimedia
devices represent a break, a sea change, in both content and platform, from
audio guides. That is to say, if one thinks of the evolution of mobile
interpretive devices as a straight line from AM/FM devices through personal
cassette players to the now-ubiquitous random-access mp3 players, multimedia
guides do not represent the logical endpoint of that evolution, but rather a
parallel and altogether different development. Multimedia guides bring
with them a suite of opportunities and difficulties that only occasionally overlap with the
opportunities and difficulties associated with audio guides. Although
the technology has changed, the mindset that produces content for the
technology has not.

It is
therefore becoming increasingly apparent that museums need to divert efforts
away from an approach in which the device itself drives the content that is
created to one in which the mobile platform is merely an endpoint of a given
content development effort. Doing this requires first re-analyzing
and re-thinking assumptions about mobile interpretation that museums have long
since taken for granted, then using that analysis to take advantage of
existing or emergent possibilities, and then settling on a development
framework that ensures continuous evolution.

Question Assumptions

"A market
response to inefficient distribution"

One pervasive
notion that has largely been taken for granted is that a "tour" model
(selected "stops" with narrative content, accessed either randomly or
in sequence) is the appropriate one for a mobile interpretive device. This framework evolved naturally from the traditional docent-led tour,
but the methods used themselves evolved not out of preference, but rather out of necessity – the medium determined the approach. Audio
guides were originally created to replace (or at least make more readily available)
the kind of content that was at that time being delivered to visitors via docents
leading tours in galleries.

In the earliest days of mobile interpretation, audio was the only medium
that could reliably deliver that kind of narrative content in a small, portable
package. Most
museums did not have this content readily available in aural form, meaning that
it had to be produced from scratch, involving either a significant investment
in production personnel and equipment or the engagement of an outside vendor. All the content was, in effect, hand-made; for each object or exhibition,
new content had to be written, edited, recorded, and transferred to the given
device. In the end, that high per-object cost, combined with limited
storage capacity on a given device, forced museums to be highly selective about
which objects (or exhibitions) would be included on a given device. Thus
the emphasis was heavy on special exhibitions (in which content development is
often funded by an exhibition budget) and carefully-selected "greatest
hits" from the permanent collection.

The
limitations placed on mobile interpretation both by the medium and the
high-cost production chain meant that certain practices became ingrained in
museums as being inseparable from the very idea of mobile interpretation. These practices include:

Content
is developed specifically for the mobile device;

Content
is typically tied to specific stops within the physical space (usually objects
or architectural features);

Objects
from the permanent collections are under-represented, in favor of special
exhibition features;

Contextual
material, beyond gallery introductions, is largely absent.

Museums have taken what was originally a practical response
– audio – to a very real problem – how to provide mobile interpretation – and
have come to assume that the content model that grew out of that practical
response is what suits visitors best. To quote Chris Anderson in The Long Tail: "Many of our assumptions about
popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching – a
market response to inefficient distribution" (Anderson, 2004). One
sees this already in the few multimedia guides that have been put together. Although the applications developed for these devices are admittedly
significantly more sophisticated than even the top-of-the-line audio player,
they still preserve its model. The device forces the visitor to consume
content via "stops" on a "tour." At each stop, the
visitor is provided narrative content (typically still audio, often now
accompanied by text, images, or video). A user of the device is reduced
to being a consumer of information. The device does not react to choices
the user makes, nor does it respond to the user's input. Because most of
the content is still made by hand, the user is limited to listening to or
viewing content predominantly from special exhibitions and some "greatest
hits" from the permanent collection.

"Don't be stingy"

This is not to
say that there is anything inherently wrong with the tour model; there is a portion
of the museum-going public who will probably always crave this
led-by-the-hand, explicitly curated approach. The problem, however, is
that the tour model appeals only to
this relatively small segment of the museum-going public. The remainder,
who might crave the ability to do more than
passively consume information, is out of luck. With each new
generation of museum-goers able to consume and filter greater quantities of
information more quickly and efficiently than the last, the greatest hits model
starts to look quite, in the words of Colleen Macklin, "stingy" (Macklin, 2009). Audio guides remove
the ability to skim large quantities of information. An entire stop must
be consumed, from start to finish, or not at all. The audio is either on,
or it's off. The net effect is that museums are forcing people who are
accustomed to digesting a lot, and quickly, to digest very little at a snail's
pace.

Significantly,
the greatest hits approach preserves a way of looking at collections that
has essentially been discarded in most Web presentations. On the Web,
museums are moving away from the "curated highlights" approach
towards a model in which the entire collection is available for searching,
browsing, and filtering. The curatorial facilitator is no longer the sole
means by which a visitor might experience an institution – museums now
encourage users to self-curate their own groupings from an entire museum's
collection. In fact, a whole list of possibilities is available to a
user browsing a museum's collection on the Web – ways that are not available in the
physical space – not least among which is the ability to acquire depth of
context (whether via translations, maps, or encyclopedias). Instead
of multiple sources of information, the visitor has access only to a single
curated 'voice' (even when multiple narrators are used). Instead of
viewing information about the entire collection, the visitor must get by with a
small slice of information about a few highlighted objects. Instead of
slicing-and-dicing an entire collection in multiple ways, visitors must stick
to the physical layout of the museum – American Decorative Arts, Asian Art,
19th Century Paintings, etc. In short, anyone hoping to carve out an
experience in the galleries as information-rich as the one on the museum's
Web site will leave the building hopelessly frustrated.

Know your audience

All of this
speaks to one of the most important un-addressed problems facing museums
developing mobile interpretive platforms: the audience for multimedia guides has never been properly defined. In
hundreds of pilot multimedia projects conducted in museums over the last
ten years, this basic question has not been answered: is the target audience
for multimedia devices the same as
the target audience for traditional audio guides? If it is, then best
practices developed to this point still apply. If it is not, then museums
must focus further research and development towards understanding this new (or
at least different) audience. Museums need to begin asking themselves
tough questions. For whom are these devices intended? What are
museums hoping to learn by pursuing pilot projects involving mobile
interpretation? Are these pilot projects pushing the development of
mobile media in such a way that specific hypotheses are proved or disproved?
As more and more museums begin pursuing these pilot projects, new
directions and new means of enhancing the visit must be explored. But
what specifically can be done to break museums out of the audio tour
mold?

Do More With What You Have

Make the entire collection available

First things first. A mobile interpretive device
should have some kind of searchable content available for every single object on display (and preferably even for those
objects that aren't). Generally, the core of this content would most
likely come from a museum's collections management system. Because this
content is often already being used for presentation on the Web and is
structured, the threshold for usage is low. Rather than having works in special
exhibitions and highlights represent the entirety of content on the device,
these objects can be called out as a subset of the larger data pool. The
implication here is that textual collections data now represents the core of
content on a given platform. This does not mean that handmade audio or
video content needs to be purged from the handheld device; it is simply that
that content would be augmentative instead of core. When available, that
content would be displayed. Indeed, in a 2005 study of the "Tate
Collections Guide" pilot, it was concluded that visitors viewed audio/video
content when available, but found text to be satisfactory otherwise (personal
correspondence between the author and Nancy Proctor, 2009).

Having textual data available for every single object opens
up the possibility to search, filter, and group objects. Our users have
come to expect this ability on the Web; now give them that same ability in the
physical space. Ad hoc grouping
means that visitors are no longer restricted to highlights constructed by
museum personnel – visitors can, in effect, create their own highlights, based
on criteria they set. If a
visitor wants to see every object in your collection created in 1892, they can
do that. If a visitor wants to see every object in your collection
donated by a particular benefactor, they can do that, too. The grouping
could be arbitrary, as well – a visitor could construct their own group by hand
as a result of performing multiple search or browse operations.

Even this simple step of taking content that already exists
and making it available to a handheld device fundamentally transforms the
nature of the handheld experience. With the ability to search, group, and
filter every object, the device becomes a digital surrogate, an assistant,
rather than a tour guide. The device has transformed from merely a content-delivery
system to a means of helping to turn a visitor's preferences into action.

Locate

To truly
translate the Web-like experience of discovery into the physical space,
however, the handheld device must provide
appropriate wayfinding. If the visitor is able to discover objects potentially
of interest, but not successfully locate those objects in the gallery space,
the handheld device has failed. Object locations should be explicitly
mapped, appropriate travel vectors within the gallery space could be defined,
and the devices themselves should be location-aware. Currently,
wayfinding, whether via maps or text directions, is a problem that might be
best tackled by several museums working together. As mapping technology
evolves, lightweight (and yet sophisticated) means of solving this problem may
present themselves.

Recommend

Once the visitor has successfully navigated his or her way
to an object, it is important to ensure that that object doesn't become a
navigational dead end. When a user is viewing an object in the physical
space, the device should always suggest additional (possibly related) objects
that may be of interest. Doing this means that the end result of a given
search is actually the beginning of another potential browsing path. The device
must therefore incorporate a recommendation engine. Ideally, this engine would work at the intersection of three
vectors: content, location, and preference.

Content recommendations would primarily be based on content
contained within a museum's collections management system or in related
curatorial scholarship. Content recommendations would involve the
clustering together of objects based on similar characteristics. In this
scenario, objects could be clustered algorithmically based on co-occurrence of terms/phrases
in those objects' collection records, or clustered manually based on objects'
inclusion in known groups (such as the Hudson River School, for instance). Potentially, content recommendations could also be made via an
Amazon-like "others who viewed this object also viewed" scenario.

The location-aware nature of modern handheld devices allows
location to also be a factor in making successful recommendations in several
ways. A museum spread out over a
large area (such as a sculpture park) might elect to limit additional
recommendations to objects that are within comfortable walking distance of the
object being currently viewed. A traditional art museum might elect to do
exactly the opposite, in that a visitor already in a given gallery might not
need to have objects from that same gallery recommended to him or her. If
a visitor is traveling along a pre-selected or pre-determined route, the
recommendations might be limited to objects with a proximity relation to that
route. Additionally, a museum may
wish to feature certain content in its gallery space, and indicate a preference
to recommend that content when the visitor is nearby.

Preference-based recommendations would involve more active
user participation. Internet radio sites like as Pandora (http://www.pandora.com/) and Last.fm (http://www.last.fm/) derive much of
their value by understanding a user's preferences over time and suggesting new
content based on that understanding. Similarly, a museum handheld device
could track content viewed by a given visitor and recommend additional content
based on the cumulative understanding gleaned from that information. The
visitor could aid in this process by indicating whether the object, content, or
location is relevant to them or not (similar to Pandora's "thumbs
up/thumbs down" approach). Recommendations could also be based on a
stated preference by the user at any time during the visit. Perhaps an
initial search on the handheld device brings up a list of results, but also a
list of preference options (which might be derived from a museum's own faceted
categorization schemas). For example, a search for "Thomas
Cole" might bring up a list of objects on display created by Thomas Cole,
but also a list of questions such as, "Are you interested in work by
artists of the Hudson River School?" or "Are you interested in works
created between 1800 and 1850?" These preferences could be then used
to determine what types of recommendations are made later in the user's visit.

Contextualize

Beyond this three-pronged recommendation engine, the mobile
platform should provide valuable context to the visitor as well. An
obvious way to do this would be to give the visitor the ability to compare and
contrast objects. The nature of museums is to physically locate objects
together by time period, style, or other common themes, removing the ability to
see how these objects might compare to other objects within the building, in
the same way that two objects might be contrasted in a print publication. It is unlikely that you would see two depictions of the same scene
painted 100 years apart on different continents in the same gallery, but you
could easily place these two works side-by-side in the device for comparison.

The point here is that once the visitor finds a subject of
interest, he or she should be able to know as much as the museum knows about
that subject while still inside the
building and even in front of the artwork that sparked the interest. A
visitor may stumble on that work by Thomas Cole, but find that more so than the
individual work itself, he or she is interested in the Hudson River School and
artists related to that movement. If he or she so desires, the visitor
should then be able to find publication excerpts, artist letters, newspaper
articles, and bibliographic citations, then group works by related artists
together and map where they are in the building. The platform becomes a
portal into the museum's knowledge base.

Provide A Multitude of Unique Experiences

Two of the
complaints often lodged against traditional audio guides are that the
headphones (or phone receivers) cut off the user from interactions with those
around them, and that audio guides force the user to digest information at the guide's pace, rather than the
user's. Both of these complaints tie into a much larger problem, which is
that the traditional audio guide (and its multimedia descendants) allow for
only one type of experience, and that that experience is, by and large,
dictated by the institution with little to no true interaction on the part of
the visitor. That experience should continue to remain a part of any interpretive
device for those visitors who desire it, but the devices of the future should
also allow for a multitude of other experiences to occur alongside it.

User-generated content

One way in
which museums have attempted to encourage a less passive experience via
multimedia guides is through the use of so-called "user-generated
content." In this scenario, content is actively solicited from the
visitor by the museum, usually in the form of comments or responses. The
benefit to the user for submitting this type of content generally falls into
one of three categories:

The
benefit to the user is delayed – visitors
can bookmark favorite objects as they move through the galleries, accessing
further information about those objects post-visit via a Web link;

The
benefit to the user is abstract – visitors
can "tag" artworks with terms or add comments or reactions, but are
unable to do anything specific with this content once it's been entered;

The
benefit to the user is nonexistent – visitors enter reactions into a guestbook-style application, but these
reactions are never seen again.

Unfortunately, much of this content tends to benefit the
institution much more than the visitor. Very little of it
fundamentally alters the nature of the visit in any way. Handhelds of the
future have to make allowances for content coming from users that truly
benefits the users themselves, during the
visit itself.

Content streams

Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, and the like have made the
concept of micro-updates in a public forum commonplace. It is not a
stretch to imagine incorporating that experience into the gallery environment. Users could enter their reactions, thoughts, and responses into the
device via a texting-style interface with a defined character limit. These
entries could then be posted to a public stream that everyone in the museum
could see. As with most microblogging clients, public replies, direct
messages, and pictures taken by the handheld devices themselves could all be
incorporated into the stream. This stream could potentially become a
valuable discovery tool, particularly when coupled with the location-aware
features of the device. As the visitor wanders around the museum, someone
posts a photo of a work he or she is interested in. Viewing the stream
overlaid onto a map of the museum (à la twittervision [http://twittervision.com/]) enables the visitor to figure out in which gallery
that photo was taken. The device then provides the visitor with
directions to that gallery from the visitor’s current location.

The stream could be used in a number of other ways, as well. First, the aggregate stream could be parsed to group posts into content
or emotional areas. For instance, the institution could encourage the use
of hashtags to identify posts about certain types of items, which would
separate those posts into a usable stream, as with this Twitter stream showing
all posts tagged with #mw2009: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=MW2009 . An institution could encourage the use of tags like #portrait,
#landscape, #still-life or similar to aid in helping other visitors locate
certain types of work in the galleries. Additionally, the stream could be
parsed for certain emotional key phrases, as with twistori. Tate Britain has already begun creating emotionally-themed tours (i.e.,
a tour of objects if you're feeling blue, happy, depressed, etc.) that are
distributed as paper brochures; parsing the stream in this way could
potentially be a means for creating these kinds of tours on-the-fly. As a
further extension, the emotionally-themed posts could be grouped on a map as
well, allowing a visitor to gauge the "emotional health" of the
institution at any given moment (i.e., "it certainly appears that there
are a lot of angry people in the Rothko exhibition right now!"). The public microblog stream could also be a way for individual
staff voices to interact with visitors in real time. This could take the
form of announcements such as posts from docents announcing the start of a tour
or an educational program, but it could also encourage interaction with staff
at a deeper level. For instance, a conservator could post a message indicating
that he is about to deinstall artwork in a particular gallery, and will be
available to answer questions.

Community-based discovery

Beyond actively posting content, users could create other
kinds of content that would be helpful for other users as well. We have
already witnessed the utility of users using social networks for resource
discovery on the Web, via social tagging sites like Delicious (http://delicious.com/kovensmith) or
feed sharing services like Google Reader (http://www.google.com/reader/shared/01569013051303405917). Moving this type of utility to a mobile device is an obvious next step. Once a visitor has mapped out a self-selected tour or grouping of
objects or locations, he or she could publish that collection to the mobile
platform for use by other visitors. Lists of these user-generated collections
could be voted upon by users as well, giving users the ability to later select
from "most traveled" user-generated tours or "most highly
rated" object groupings.

These types of user-generated content allow the device to go
beyond simply being an information delivery vessel, and become a platform for
all types of experiences, many of which may yet be unforeseen by the
institution that provides the device. The cumulative effect of all of
this posting, picture-taking, interacting, and talking is both a more social
experience, and one which cannot ever be repeated in the same way twice. The visitor has left the building feeling that he or she has participated
in something that both could have only occurred
inside the institution (as opposed to on the Web) and could have only occurred on that particular
day, at that particular time. The visit has been personalized, and made
unique.

Build For the Future

As can be seen
from the small number of suggestions posed here, implementing the interpretive
device of the future will require that museums challenge their preconceived
notions about what these devices should (or can) do, while simultaneously
understanding that their visitors are becoming more savvy about technology, not less. Museums will need to
build for the future by cycling through a series of steps:

Audience
research. Museums
should doggedly focus on understanding how to improve device adoption rates
among their visitors. It is simply no longer tenable for a museum to not
know why a majority of its audience doesn't use interpretive technology. Results of audience research should be targeted towards specific
development goals on the device itself.

Application-centered
design. With
older handheld technologies, there was always the problem that a museum was
introducing a device that was almost inevitably going to be unfamiliar to most
visitors. This led to an approach to application design in which the
emphasis was on simplicity and making a single "foolproof"
application. iPhones and their ilk, however, have led users to expect a
complex device with simple applications – most iPhone applications do only one
thing, in the most straightforward way possible. Museums should take
advantage of this by separating functions into different applications that work
in concert.

Pilot
projects. To
date, most pilot projects involving mobile multimedia devices have focused on
determining, basically, whether or not the technology is viable in the museum
environment. The next wave of pilot projects must move past this and begin
to determine what kinds of
applications and frameworks work best for museums. Application-centered design means, for instance, that a
museum could have stable "object finder" applications running on its
devices while piloting "recommender" applications at the same time, on the same devices. Because the application is being piloted on devices that already have a
user base, the collated user statistics will better aid audience research
efforts.

Often these steps might be concurrent. In fact, a
stable device could introduce a new application as a pilot project, and gauge
user feedback and statistics as a form of audience research. Understanding the audience, creating separate applications, and running
better pilot projects also mean that museums no longer need to develop mobile
experiences in isolation. One institution might develop a good wayfinding
application, another a recommendation engine, still another a microblogging
client. All of these applications could be made available to all institutions
– the community benefits from the community.

In any case,
it is clear that museums must begin to push harder to develop mobile
experiences that challenge traditional notions of interpretation if they don't wish
to be left designing for yesterday's audience. Doing so means that
museums must be willing to discard outmoded approaches when appropriate,
incorporate new ideas and content when available, and recognize that the only
steady state is that of constant improvement. Adopting that framework
will ensure that mobile interpretation continues to be a vital and important
component of the museum experience well into the future.